The run up to International Women’s Day is a poignant time for the Royal Academy to unveil its Angelika Kauffmann show. While the global day of celebration naturally focuses on the rights and achievements of contemporary women, it also tends to prompt the re-discovery of those whose achievements have been forgotten, or severely downplayed, in a history mostly written by men.
Kauffmann is a perfect example.
In her lifetime, she was a superstar of the art world. The great and the good sought her out for their portraits. Her epic history paintings graced the finest buildings. She was a founding member of the Royal Academy in London, and her studio in Rome became an essential stop for aristocrats on the grand tour. In her time, her name would have been regularly grouped with Gainsborough and Reynolds. These days, most people know them … but not her. This show aims to redress that balance.
It is a luscious exhibition full of people and landscapes that are easy on the eye. If you are someone who loves Bridgerton for feel-good entertainment that wraps you in a cosy bubble of rich, attractive people, you will be very happy in these galleries. Everyone sports a flawless complexion, pale as cream except for delicate pink blushes and rosy lips. Gorgeous clothes fold, cascade and drape around fit bodies. Most critically, eyes sparkle. Kauffmann doesn’t quite come up to the mastery of the smile that made last year’s Frans Hals show such a joy, but she is world class at painting eyes that radiate merriment, intelligence and jollity. Look at the scandalous but exquisite Emma Hamilton (above), or the charismatic thespian David Garrick (below). These are rooms full of people you’d follow on Instagram and pay dearly to party with.
Serious pundits of the art world will take my Bridgerton reference as a criticism. It’s not. In fact, it’s why Kauffmann represents her age so well.
In many ways, we are closer to the Georgians than to the buttoned-up, etiquette-obsessed Victorians and Edwardians who are nearer to us in time. Georgian London was an age of celebrity, often criticised for style over substance. Women were a long way from even, but there were famous female names in the arts, politics, and literature. Sexual mores were loser than they were to become. Artists searching for their truth didn’t typically plunge into disturbing depths, but rather looked for a composite of positives to give us a person’s best self, a landscape’s ideal look or a building’s most perfect iteration. Think social media airbrushing apps for an earlier age.
This isn’t just all about beautiful people, however. In her time, Kauffmann was particularly famous … and deeply unusual … for being a woman who embraced epic history painting. These, not portraits or landscapes, were considered the highest form of art by the Georgians. By their nature they were exclusive and male-oriented. They often focused on battles or warriors, generally full of thrusting, semi-naked men who it wouldn’t be considered appropriate for women to paint. More significantly, history paintings tended to explore nuances of ancient civilisations or classical myth that you had to be extremely well-educated to grasp.
Your average shopkeeper was unlikely to look at a scene and instantly understand “those must be the Horatii boys taking their oath,” much less discuss the relevance of the story to modern politics over their port. Women ... even rich ones ... tended not to get the educations that opened that world to them either. Nor were they allowed in to life drawing classes to master capturing male form. Emphasising that point is a fascinating group portrait in the show depicting all the founding members of the Royal Academy. It’s set in a life drawing classroom, which Kauffmann and her fellow female founder Mary Moser couldn’t enter, so they’re included as portraits on the wall.
Kauffmann worked around that reality. The Swiss-born daughter of an established painter drank in both history and art at his knee and was quickly acclaimed a child prodigy. So it’s not surprising she took on history painting. But she did it with a difference. She gives us the great stories from a woman’s point of view. It’s still history, but an inversion of the familiar. My favourite in the show gives us the young Edward III on crusade before he became king. You can imagine the battlefield fun the men would have had with this. All that blood! All those exotic arms and armour! Kauffmann chooses instead a tale of the soon-to-be-queen Eleanor saving her husband’s life by sucking poison out of the cut of an assassin’s blade.
Eleanor and Edward were one of the monarchy’s greatest love stories. London’s Charing Cross is the last of a series of memorials a heartbroken Edward built to commemorate every place her coffin rested en route from her death to her funeral and internment in Westminster Abbey. Here, they are young lovers. Kauffman’s feminine perspective still gives us bravery and nobility, those staples of history painting, but we get a quiet moment of tender intimacy, Eleanor’s lips pressed gently to her husband’s arm. Eleanor looks calm and determined, the maids behind her impressed, the future king awestruck by this demonstration of love.
Think of the trend in Hollywood over the past 20 years to give us stories with stronger heroines, or to rework familiar tales from the woman’s perspective, and you’ll grasp what Kauffmann was doing 250 years ago. There are only a handful of her history paintings here. I would have liked more.
In fact, I would have liked to have seen more of everything. Three galleries in the attic doesn’t seem enough to me for a woman of such significance, who left behind an enormous body of work. That includes contributions to architecture they could have shown off with models or projections. We do get the panels she painted for the ceilings of the new Royal Academy, but there’s nothing else of the contributions she made to Palladian country houses. She was a favourite of Robert Adam, and spent some time working in houses in Ireland that were following his style. I first encountered her work as a series of decorative pendants in the crumbling but still-magnificent Castletown House.
I would also have liked more on her life, relationships and opinions. She was both phenomenally talented and exceptionally shrewd at business. An early self-portrait shows her torn between the muses of art and music. As a young woman she was as talented a singer as she was an artist, but the family priest warned her of the moral dangers of going down the operatic route.
In fact, I would have liked to have seen more of everything. Three galleries in the attic doesn’t seem enough to me for a woman of such significance, who left behind an enormous body of work. That includes contributions to architecture they could have shown off with models or projections. We do get the panels she painted for the ceilings of the new Royal Academy, but there’s nothing else of the contributions she made to Palladian country houses. She was a favourite of Robert Adam, and spent some time working in houses in Ireland that were following his style. I first encountered her work as a series of decorative pendants in the crumbling but still-magnificent Castletown House.
I would also have liked more on her life, relationships and opinions. She was both phenomenally talented and exceptionally shrewd at business. An early self-portrait shows her torn between the muses of art and music. As a young woman she was as talented a singer as she was an artist, but the family priest warned her of the moral dangers of going down the operatic route.
Her travels with her father, the way she built her brand before she arrived in England so she stepped into a market ready to embrace her, an intriguing first marriage to a fraudster who pretended aristocracy and was presumably after her money, her role in the RA, her eventual establishment in Rome. It’s all here, but in brief. This show gives us a pencil sketch, and I wanted a fully realised history painting.
Don’t let that put you off from going, however. In a world of art history dominated by men and masculine stories, Kauffmann provides a refreshing counterpoint and reminds us that there were a lot more women doing interesting things in 18th century Europe than we tend to remember.
Angelica Kauffmann is in the Jillian and Arthur M. Sackler Galleries at the Royal Academy, Burlington House, until 30 June 2024.
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